Papers › Orbital Stability of Exomoons and Submoons with Applications to Kepler 1625b-I
Orbital Stability of Exomoons and Submoons with Applications to Kepler 1625b-I
Marialis Rosario-Franco, Billy Quarles, Zdzislaw Musielak, Manfred Cuntz
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An intriguing question in the context of dynamics arises: Could a moon possess a moon itself? Such a configuration does not exist in the Solar System, although this may be possible in theory. Kollmeier et al. (2019) determined the critical size of a satellite necessary to host a long-lived sub-satellite, or submoon. However, the orbital constraints for these submoons to exist are still undetermined. Domingos et al. (2006) indicated that moons are stable out to a fraction of the host planet Hill radius R_(H,p), which in turn depends on the eccentricity of its host's orbit. Motivated by this, we simulate a system of exomoons and submoons for 10⁵ planetary orbits, while considering many initial orbital phases to obtain the critical semimajor axis in terms of R_(H,p) or the hosts satellite's Hill radius R_(H,sat), respectively. We find that, assuming circular coplanar orbits, the stability limit for exomoons is 0.40 R_(H,p) and for a submoon is 0.33 R_(H,sat). Additionally, we discuss the observational feasibility of detecting these sub-satellites through photometric, radial velocity, or direct imaging observations using the Neptunes-sized exomoon candidates Kepler 1625b-I (Teachey et al. 2018) and identify how stability can shape the identification of future candidates.
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